2025-01-30 23:41:25
Investors fetishize reading yet Buffett compounded wisdom and relationships. The two reinforced each other.
Yes, Buffett wanted to get rich. But he did it in a way that was interesting and rewarding to him. It was his way of becoming the best version of himself.
The next Warren Buffett will not wait to be handed enlightenment. They will not be content to adopt their teachers’ methods and ideas.
Buffett did not care about appearances. He desired the freedom to live life on his own terms and to be surrounded by family and friends. His journey of accumulating wealth started with a fierce desire for independence.
Buffett turned his company into a preferred home for businesses he wanted to invest in and leaders he enjoyed working with. He did this by becoming what he wanted to attract.
It’s possible to study someone like Buffett, yet retain Graham’s degree of emotional detachment. Investing and business can remain an occupation and not turn into life-consuming passions.
What were the turning points in Buffett’s life? Could he have ended up a trader, a hedge fund manager, or a corporate raider?
Even Buffett borrowed important ideas and timeless wisdom from those he admired.
Even though their relationship didn’t survive The Snowball, Schroeder offers an invaluable perspective on Buffett. Her Q&A’s are a must-read.
Imagine if Charlie Munger’s ego had prevented him from becoming number two at the world’s most successful investment enterprise. A look at the partnership of two exceptional minds.
People were intrigued by the wealth, but they stuck around, and returned, for the wisdom and relationships.
2025-01-30 23:06:00
No matter your net worth, unless you explore your feelings and beliefs around money, they will unconsciously steer your life. Lessons from the Ultra-Wealthy
We think we work hard and save money for ourselves. But our most gratifying investments are in people. How Eighty-One Dollars Made Lyndon Johnson
The real money work is inner work. Why Fortunes Are Lost (Why Money Work is Inner Work)
Depending on the money reality we live in — lack, affluence, abundance — money challenges us in different ways. What Money Asks Of Us (The Three Money Realities)
Money can trigger feelings of guilt — and an unconscious effort to lose it again. Al Pacino and the Weight of Wealth
Life with money is like a continuous test. It asks what kind of world we want to live in and what we are willing to sacrifice. Money is a Test (What Money Means)
When money comes easily, potential mistakes seem inconsequential. Even the father of value investing confused his wants and his needs. Ben Graham's Duplex
Careful what life experiment you run. Don't be the Bryan Johnson of money.
2025-01-30 04:15:20
I used to have a spreadsheet to track my net worth. It was crude, just a list of accounts and values that I entered by hand. I didn’t use the number for anything except track progress toward my goal.
The goal was a large amount of money. That, I figured, was success. It seemed ambitious but, frankly, the number didn’t mean anything. It disappeared from my mind as soon as I closed the spreadsheet. Its most important quality, its only important quality was that it could be measured.
“In our society, money is like health,” someone told me over dinner last week. When you have it, you don’t think about it much. But when you don’t, it’s hard to focus on anything else.
But wait: here is a counterexample: Bryan Johnson who turned his life into an anti-aging experiment.
At first, Johnson aged like the rest of us. Then he decided not to die. Now he tracks lots of biomarkers and despite being in pretty much perfect health, he is completely preoccupied with it.
There is another man working to “push the man upstairs back” as far as possible — 92-year-old former market wizard Ed Thorp (my profile: Survival of the Fittest Mind). Compared to Johnson, what Thorp does is … boring. He uses a trader’s framework: control downside, capture upside, no crazy experiments, limit complexity. Exercise, regular checkups, basic supplements, some drugs, thinking through risks independently. (He recommends Outlive by Peter Attia).
2025-01-26 05:06:31
How much time do we have left, individually and collectively?
I like to think I have many wonderful decades left. It’s a comforting thought. But of course, I have no idea.
Ernest Becker believed the ‘terror of death’ was so depressing, so crushing, that we humans would do anything to avoid it. We escape it through distraction: doom-scrolling and “drinking and drugging’. Or we dedicate ourselves to creating ‘immortality projects,’ dreams that outlast us like culture or the next Amazon.
When I bumped into spirituality, my fear of time became crippling. Oh my god, life matters and I’ve already wasted so much of it. I felt behind, too slow, and late for a destiny I could barely sense, like a distant shape in the fog. And yet, I wasted time.
You would think this anxiety would have propelled me forward with great urgency.
You would think the uncertainty of time would make us savor every moment, treasure it like the last glimpse of a rainbow.
But the opposite can be true.
In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky wrote about his years in a Siberian prison camp. One little passage always stuck with me. How strange it was, he observed, for the prisoners to “labor in the harshest conditions for a month,” and then spend their money “to the last kopeck” on a night of drunken debauchery.
To be sure, it would have been difficult for the inmates to save their money. But Dostoevsky sensed something deeper, a longing for “one moment’s forgetfulness” and the “freedom of action.” His fellow inmates wasted their money because the future was too uncertain, the present too depressing, and because they could.
It was a tiny act of free will, one of the few remaining choices.
You and I are free to save our money, but we remain imprisoned in life’s relentless march toward death. What we waste in rebellion is time.
Wasting time devalues it. If I squander this day, I must be confident I can make up for it tomorrow. It is a self-defeating act of spite, a tiny fuck you to the universe and its impenetrable timeline. Procrastination is our way of spending our last coin on cheap prison moonshine knowing the hangover will be awful. Because we can.
2025-01-17 03:45:55
Hello friends,
My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires. It has been heartbreaking to see so many homes lost overnight.
While I watched footage of the devastation, my thoughts returned to a piece that had been sitting in my drafts for some time. I’ve long struggled with that word, home, and what it means. Do we get to choose where home is?
I grew up in Germany, but for a decade or so, New York clearly was home. It was not just the marriage, the job, and the apartment with my stuff (my books, really). When I stepped off the plane, I felt lighter, as if I had been unshackled of a great weight. I wanted to touch the walls and floors, make sure it was real. I would skip through the airport toward that vast and strange country. America felt like the future — like my future. I didn’t wonder what I felt unburdened of.
Visits to Germany felt like walking into a minefield of emotional triggers, like long exercises in shadow work. At first, my heart would jump. I would cherish the sight of lush hills and forests. My mouth would water at the smell of fresh bread. But with every hour I would breathe in more of its psychosphere, its Weltschmerz. My Heimat seemed stuck: anxious about the future, haunted by a poisoned past, condemned to a gloomy present.
I experienced a kind of claustrophobia: the state was less powerful but more encroaching, the people more distant but also more concerned with whether I followed the rules. The German character with its pedantry, obedience, and self-righteousness felt suffocating.1
I would wait for examples of this unbearable German-ness. Like that time Frankfurt’s airport security found drops of water in my Hydro Flask and called armed reinforcements. Or when neighbors noticed a plastic yogurt container in the wrong trash bag. More recently, I read about politicians suing their citizens over memes. How petty and insecure do you have to be?
For some time, this was my life. I did not understand America (it really is a strange place), but I could accept it. Germany I understood but could not accept. But things have become more complicated.
Last summer, I had to escape New York whose relentless energy was wearing me down. I was walking circles in my underworld and hoped for clarity and direction. But we only get to choose where we go, not what matters once we get there.
Ever since becoming spiritual, I have been paying more attention to the energy of a place, weird as that might sound. I regularly visit my grandparents’ grave when I am in the country. When I visit a new town, I try to spend a few minutes of meditation and prayer in the local church. I try to check in, for lack of a better word.
That summer I was most touched by a place that seemed utterly unremarkable: a small lake near my mother’s birthplace. My mother and I followed a wooden footbridge to the middle of the lake. It was a serenely sunny and quiet day, nothing but a breeze, birds in the distance, occasionally a fish popping to the surface. What happened was strange: not only did I feel at peace, but the world’s texture seemed to change at the edge of my eyes, in subtle ways, the more I surrendered to it. I could no longer tell if I was reacting to the place or it to me.
And I noticed that a part of me resisted. It’s so boring here, my inner American objected. We’re far away from where things happen, from the things that matter. But to me, the perfection of that afternoon seemed to contain everything that mattered.
At the end of my trip, I took a two-day detour to the town of Eschweiler near Aachen. I had experienced a strange synchronicity in New York when I bumped into the grave of an American soldier who may have shared the Eschweiler battlefield with my grandfather. I visited two military cemeteries. I sat and prayed and watched the rows of silent graves. Nothing happened.
What I remember instead are the difficult conversations with the woman running the bed and breakfast. This was shortly after a jihadist knife attack in not-too-distant Solingen. What do you say to someone who is angry, afraid, and feels like a stranger in the town they grew up in? I didn’t say much, I listened. I had a plane to catch the next day. This time, it felt like I was running away.
New York teaches its residents to have their guard up. It’s too dense and noisy and filled with too many unpredictable people. You learn to mind your own business, to put on armor against the chaotic energy. Germany was different. Germany allowed no such numbness and indifference. It slipped right underneath my skin.
I returned in December for grandma’s funeral and stuck around for Christmas. Two weeks total, a lot of family time in my book. We broke up the schedule for some alone time just so, you know, we wouldn’t accidentally stab each other or have another screaming match. On the afternoon of the 24th, I went for a long walk. I needed to be alone with the fading light.
I passed the old houses, paced along the river, out of town, toward the distant sun that clawed its way through the clouds. My hands greeted moss-covered trees. I felt the soil and the wet grass. Somehow just being there, among rocks and water, somehow that was enough. Between heaven and earth, there was a sliver of silence that held me, nourished me. It was an ancient, perfect quiet, like a silence between wars.
For a moment, I resisted. I did not want to like it that much. I walked with my fist raised toward the sky, shaking it at God like a crazy person. What do you want from me? But there was no denying that I truly felt of this place, one with it. There was a love in the wind that no words could erase.
I suppose that with enough money, you can call pretty much any place home. Cities like New York make it easy because so many people are in flux, always arriving or departing, rarely settled. And it’s so large and diverse that even the oddballs can find their alien tribe. Maybe L.A. is like that too, I’ve only seen it as a tourist.
But New York’s problems, and those of the US as a whole, seemed so great and chronic, that I could keep them at a distance. I could shrug at the madness. Sorry, above my paygrade. Hope someone will fix it.
By comparison, what ailed the Germans felt intimate and inescapable. Somehow, those impossibly rigid people still felt like family. When I despair at their nature, it is because I find it in myself. My heart beats faster on the soil of my birth and my blood runs with its waters. I don’t know yet what to do with that, I just pay attention when the wind whispers.
I’ve never lost my home to catastrophe and I can’t imagine what it must feel like. But I am learning that home is worth fighting for. Also, that home contains a polarity. I used to think of it as a castle, a place of protection and safety. But maybe home is not just a place of comfort but of challenge. What if home is not only what we need but where we feel needed?
Perhaps home is where even the biggest problems feel intimate, where you can’t keep your distance.
I think home is where we sense beauty underneath the ugliness, perfection underneath the flaws. It is what we want to tear down and rebuild because it tears us to pieces.
No fortune can create a bond between your heart and the soil. Money can’t lift your spirit into the clouds or merge you into the mist. If life is suffering, perhaps home is where that suffering feels worth it. Home may be our place of love, but nobody said love would be easy. Maybe home is just where the heart burns.
— Frederik
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In his book The Germans, historian and Germanophile Gordon Craig recounted his first trip to Germany in the mid-1930s. Toward the end of the trip, he met the American consul:
“I said … I found it strange that a people that had been famous for its irrepressible individualism in religion and philosophy should have made obedience to political authority so supreme a virtue.
"Oh my yes," Hathaway replied. "I live in a little village south of Munich, and the people there are hard-working and friendly and not interested in politics in general, and they and I like and respect each other. But if someone in uniform came to them and said, 'March!,' they would march. And if he said, 'Go and cut off Hathaway's head! He is a bad man!, they would reply, 'We didn't know that!' But they would cut my head off all the same.”
2025-01-12 01:08:40
I think of all of us as vessels for energy. Like a bunch of light bulbs. For us to really shine, we need to be plugged into a source of energy.
If that sounds too ‘woo’ or abstract, take a look at writer, director, and producer Taylor Sheridan. At age 38, his life looked like an episode of ‘Follow your bliss gone wrong’.
The Texan had dropped out of college and moved to LA to become an actor but struggled to get roles. Sheridan was repeatedly broke. Sometimes he camped with friends on a nearby reservation. His big break — drum roll — was a minor role on the show Sons of Anarchy.
Then his son was born and Sheridan realized he wasn’t earning enough money to support his new family. When he asked for a raise, he was told to take a hike. “They were like, buddy, you're never going to be a star,” he recalled. “This is what you're worth.”
This is what you are worth. Ouch.
But in his heart, Sheridan agreed. He no longer believed in himself as an actor. After nearly two decades of struggle, he had hit a wall. “10th on the call sheet” was the best he would ever be.
And then the “Sheridan light bulb” gets screwed into a different socket. The left column is his life as an actor. The right one is a decade of Sheridan the writer, director, producer, and dad. What? Are we sure this is the same person?
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,” Bill Gates said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Point taken. But how, Bill? How? How do I wildly underestimate my next ten years and go full-on Taylor Sheridan?
Some energy you can buy off the shelf, like a battery. Make a new year’s resolution, set a big goal, hit the gym, crush a Celsius or drop some Adderall, put on your favorite music… You can fly for a while until you crash like a cannonball. On-off bursts of energy, of optimism and despair can feel like hell, like you’re stuck wandering in Dante’s infinite loops.
Sheridan gained and sustained tremendous momentum. Trung Phan pointed out the magic of massive commitments and tight deadlines. Sheridan created a structure that forced him to succeed at speed, like a pressure cooker. There’s some truth to that. Sheridan had to support his family. But it does not explain the outpouring of creative energy — which seemed to accelerate rather than burn out.
“True behavior change is identity change,” wrote James Clear. Sheridan didn’t change his identity as much as he re-discovered it, re-committed to it. He stopped pretending and took off his mask. Change rippled through his life like a tsunami from the core.
